A somewhat strange card, I struggle to see its use cases, and apparently so do most people as I have yet to see a deck that includes this card, be it Jinteki or otherwise. What follows is less of a structured review and simply some of my thoughts and musings. I would be very fascinated to hear the designer's thought process behind this card, so, if you are reading this please leave a comment below or even a full review explaining your thinking as I'd be fascinated to learn, perhaps there is some grand combo I'm simply missing.

Pseudo-damage is pretty much worse than damage in every way, it removes cards from the Grip, but instead of putting them in the Heap where they are hard to get to, it puts them in the Stack, where they will be drawn back into. Not only that but it cannot be used to Flatline the Runner, this card can leave the Runner at 0 cards in hand, but will never win you the game outright.

Thus, pseudo-damage is best combined with real damage to strike the finishing blow, Data Loop can be used to soften the Runner up for nasty traps or painful agendas like Fujii Asset Retrieval for example. Yet as this card is a Terminal, it cannot be used in combination with End of the Line, Mindscaping or Angelique Garza Correa, all of which would otherwise be the obvious kill combos that come to mind.

The other major example of such an effect is Daniela Jorge Inácio, who is also released in this Cycle, but who lists the pseudo-damage as a "cost," which means that if the runner has only a single card in hand for example, they cannot steal the agenda they are accessing, nor trash Daniela. Thus, keeping the Runner on low hand size, even if it does not fully Flatline the Runner, nevertheless serves as a defence in its own way.

Bring Them Home does none of these things, it's not Net Damage so it cannot kill by itself, it's a Terminal Action so it cannot be used as a set-up for a kill and it does not protect anything like Daniela does. This card does little on its own so it almost certainly has to be part of a combo, but what combo?

The only thing I can think of is that against Jinteki it's often desirable to run on a full hand, or perhaps even to be overdrawn as a contingency against the aforementioned Daniela as well as the sheer amount of Net Damage Jinteki traps, defensive upgrades and agendas themselves can do. By removing 2-3 cards from the Runners hand right before a turn you predict they intend on running you force them to spend 2-3 clicks drawing back up before they run, which in turn forces them to run on their 3rd or 4th click...

In this way, you might think of it as a kind of pseudo-lockdown (I know I've used the word "pseudo" a lot in this review), where you install an Agenda, advance it once and then play this card as a pre-emptive protective measure.

Since we're just chatting, I'll give you the rundown on Lockdowns:

• (2/1) You don't want to use a lockdown with a 2/1 since you can just score it from hand, using a Lockdown is needlessly risky to score

• (3/1 or 3/2) Half the value of these cards is that you can bluff them being assets or upgrades and the runner can't affordably check every single facedown card that is ever installed in the scoring remote

• (5/3 or other 5+ advancement counter cards like Sisyphus Protocol, Jumon and so and so forth) To score these out you almost always need to Install > Adance > Advance, then triple Advance on the next turn. If you Install > Advance > play a Lockdown, you'll need to Advance > Advance > Advance next turn and then wait another turn to Advance at least once more. Using the Lockdown delays the scoring and leaves the Agenda sitting in the remote for twice as many of the Runner's turns, and still at least one of the Runner's turns where it's not protected by a Lockdown unless you want to do some messy, inane strategy where you chain together multiple Lockdowns over multiple turns.

That means that the best situation to use lockdowns is to protect 4/2s since you can Install > Advance > play the Lockdown, then triple advance on the next turn. Some fast-advance/never-advance tools can be used to turn 5/3s into what are effectively 4/3s, like Seamless Launch, Biotic Labor, The Holo Man or SanSan City Grid. However, that's a narrow window of opportunity to get value from a Lockdown that spends the rest of the game sitting blank in your hand, it's for that reason that few Lockdowns see play, you would need your Lockdown to provide you immense amounts of value when it is used to justify its inclusion in the first place. The only Jinteki Lockdown in rotation Hyoubu Precog Manifold, fails this test and thus sees very little play.

Since this card requires the Runner to have stolen or trashed a card on their last turn it's an even narrower window of opportunity, where the Runner needs to trash or steal a card, then you Install > Advance your 4/2 then play this card. Which, is almost always just way too niche a situation to justify, because all this card does in a best-case scenario is force the Runner to run 3rd or 4th click.

The use case for this card is getting incredibly complicated and convoluted at this point:

• Step 1: Threat 3 has been reached
• Step 2: The Runner stole or trashed a card on their last turn
• Step 3: Install advance a 4/2 agenda or some kind of trap you want to bait the Runner into accessing by making it look more important than it is
• Step 4: Play Bring Them Home
• Step 5: The Runner spend 3 clicks to draw 3 cards, putting them back at 5 cards in hand
• Step 6: The Runner runs the remote you want them to, best case scenario they hit an Urtica Cypher and now they are on 1 cards in hand
• Step 7: Play that Distributed Tracing you imported for 4 Influence and just happened to have drawn into at the same time as all these other cards
• Step 8: Play that End of the Line you also imported for another 4 influence and just happened to have drawn into at the same time as all these other cards

Win the game?

That's assuming the runner has no contingencies of their own, like AirbladeX (JSRF Ed.), Stoneship Chart Room, Steelskin Scarring and so on and so forth. And that's assuming they have no compressed draw of their own like Dr. Nuka Vrolyck or Diesel which could be used around Step 5, allowing them to run on click 2 instead of click 4, thus giving them time to draw back up after the run and recover from hitting the Urtica Cypher. And that's assuming you did lay a trap and the Runner didn't just steal the game-winning agenda. And that's assuming the runner doesn't just ignore your trap and run elsewhere, such as a central server and win that way.

Not gonna lie, I'm not loving it so far...

What about using this card to fast advance a Blood in the Water? Cool idea but you can't score agendas after taking a Terminal Action so that idea dies in its cradle.

Aside from that... there's Hyobu Institute... you know, that Jinteki ID that everybody plays and that I totally didn't forget about and didn't just find when scrolling through a list of Jinteki IDs. Here it is if you're wondering: Hyoubu Institute: Absolute Clarity. Hyobu nets you a credit if you don't use the Threat 3 ability so there's that... Ah... anyway...

Don't get me wrong, I love the theme of this card and the quote above is just the absolute cherry on top, so bone-chillingly creepy, such a saccharine sentiment, like a controlling, abusive parent who "just wants what's best for you." It's sickening and such a perfect quote for Jinteki, I just can't figure out how to make this card work in an actual deck.

Edit: Something I missed on my initial review is that is card is actually one of a triplet of cards released in Liberation that all share 3 things in common.

1. They are all Terminal actions
2. They all can only be played if the runner stole an agenda or trashed a card on their last turn
3. They all have a Threat 3 effect that strengthens the initial effect for an added cost

The other 2 being Oppo Research and Active Policing. Of the three I think Oppo is probably the strongest, quickly becoming the staple in almost all NBN decklists including the World winning one. It either taxes the runner the entirety of their turn and 8 credits or forces them to float tags, enabling an arsenal of tag punishment, which in turn fuels kill decks and even causes it to be imported into Weyland tag and bag as a serious alternative to Public Trail.

Active Policing enables HB click-based mind-games visa a vie M.I.C., Jaguarundi, Manegarm Skunkworks, Ikawah Project and just generally synergizes with other forms of click consumption like Riot Suppression, Hypoxia or MCA Austerity Policy to deny the runner the ability to fight back. And even this card sees limited play.

While this card makes sense in theory as Jinteki's equivalent of pressuring cards in hand, card draw is not nearly as finite as clicks and thus removing 3 cards from hand, cannot compete with taxing the runner 2 clicks, let alone burying the runner in 4 tags. As mentioned before 1 Dr. Nuka Vrolyck charge can re-draw the runner 3 cards in a single click and there is simply no good equivalent for removing 4 tags so quickly and easily.

The general function of this card is similar to Personal Workshop, but the differences matter.

They are similar in the respect that these are two different 1 resources that let you install hosted programs and counters in the middle of a run, sometimes with a small discount. That's the core functionality that a Shaper needs, really; being able to see the ice and prepare moments before you slam into it.

However, Paule's Cafe represents a more significant risk-reward payout and build-around.

With Personal Workshop, the only thing you need to do to get the discount is wait. This only gets you 1 credit of value per turn; but as long as you can keep something on it at all times, you're guaranteed that drip econ. You can also afford to wait a very long time; there's no hurry to install anything once it's on the workshop, apart from the risk of getting tagged and the corp blowing the resource up.

Paule's Cafe, meanwhile, is actually a cost, if you don't have any connections installed. Assuming that you are installing the one discounted card per turn, you need 2 connections in order to see the same discount as Personal Workshop. Any turn you take off, you're losing the economic benefit. And if you double-install on one turn, you're losing the benefit and still paying the 1-credit overhead.

The best-case scenario, on the other hand, is pretty good. If you can get down 3 or 4 persistent connections, you start to generate some serious advantage. Getting an instant-speed install at a discount of 2 or 3 credits every turn adds up extremely quickly.

But, that is kind of difficult. Any strategy built around unique cards has the problem of "dead draws"--by putting more than one copy of any unique card in your deck, you run the risk of drawing it when you already drew an earlier copy, wasting the click. If your only dead draw is a second copy of your console, that's reasonable, but if you're filling your deck with unique connections you start to have a statistically appreciable number of dead draws, counteracting the economy of the cafe.

You can avoid this by having a deck full of 1-off connections...but then you run into the problem of how many viable connections there actually are in your format. If you're playing weak connection cards just to fuel the Cafe, you're weaking your deck's overall game plan.

The 4 influence also is pretty prohibitive to put into any non-Shaper deck.

Overall, I think this is strictly worse than Personal Workshop. But Paule's cafe is Standard-legal and the Workshop isn't, and so any Shaper deck which is already running 1 or 2 connections could consider slotting a singleton Cafe without worrying about it.

The Corp must decide how many cards they will draw (any number from 0 to X), then draw that many cards. They cannot see the cards as they draw them, then use this information to decide when to stop drawing. The same is true for the installs; first the Corp decides how many cards they will install, then they install that many cards one at a time.

Adding a review as there isn't one at the time of writing.

It can be difficult to give good constructive feedback because I love this game, these cards and everything I'm about to say comes from a place of love and wanting to help the designers. This card... sucks. It's probably one of the worst cards released in Liberation and sees a proportional amount of play to that power level.

The runner can just run through this, like, without breakers... with very minimal drawbacks. If you're wondering how here are some options:

• click 1: draw, click 2: draw, click 3: run through Piranhas like wasn't even there
• click 1: use Dr. Nuka Vrolyck, click 2: run through Piranhas like it wasn't even there
• click 1: play Diesel, click 2: run through Piranhas like it wasn't even there
• click 1: play Steelskin Scarring, click 2: run through Piranhas like it wasn't even there
• click 1: use Verbal Plasticity, click 2: run through Piranhas like wasn't even there
• start of turn: Earthrise Hotel triggers, click 1: run through Piranhas like wasn't even there
• last turn: play The Class Act, click 1: run through Piranhas like wasn't even there
• better yet, have a Stoneship Chart Room installed and you can face-check this ICE and still get through it

(You can also use a Botulus or Boomerang or Physarum Entangler or almost any other form of ICE cheating if you don't want to take any damage and all these options will get you in without any problems (unlike some other strong ICE like Anansi, Cloud Eater or Hammer that have special text)

This is absolutely hilarious, this card is Diviner (which is already a very weak card), yet more than twice as expensive and somehow even less consistent at ending the run. Just to be kind, the Corp then gifts the Runner a Bad Publicity to help them run through all the rest of their ICE more cheaply because why not?

This card does less damage than an Anemone, draws the Corp a card as though that's somehow worth the cost and then sits around twiddling its thumbs as the Runner moves past it, I don't know how you could have designed a less scary version of Piranhas.

Its sister program, Valentão (keep in mind the numbers are identical only the subroutine text differs), at least makes some sense, it's pretty reasonable to assume that a Weyland player would have more money than the Runner (though some Shapers will give the Corp a run for it's money, no pun intended). Even without the first two subroutines firing, the third has a legitimate threat of ending the run anyway. Let all the subroutines fire and Valentão triggers a 4-credit swing and probably bounces the runner out. If they want to get in, they have to break it, and if they are already going to interface, they might as well fully break it, and that's where these two cards shine.

• 5 credits for Unity even with 3 Icebreakers installed (even if you somehow have 4 Icebreakers installed it still costs 4 credits to break fully)
• 5 credits for Buzzsaw, and that's with K2CP Turbine support
• 5 credits for Lobisomem (which is the most expensive Decoder in Standard at the time of writing)
• 4 / 8 credits for Euler (depending on if this is the turn it was installed)
• 7/9 credits for Shibboleth (depending on the threat level)
• 8 credits for Cat's Cradle

AI does a little better:

• Audrey v2 can break it for 2 cards and 2 virus counters, or only 1 virus counter if you only need to break the pseudo-ETR sub and don't care about the corp getting a little money
• Slap Vandal interfaces neatly and can get away with only breaking the pseudo-ETR sub
• Aumakua does the worst of the 3, requiring 6 virus counters and still needing to pay up to 3 credits to fully break

That being said, against the vast majority of breaker suites, these two pieces of ICE will cost the runner a hefty sum, or require quite a bit of set-up to deal with, thanks to their amazing rez cost-to-strength ratio. The only problem is that while the runner often needs to break Valentão to get in, you'd have to mind control the Runner to convince them they're locked out by a Piranhas.

The fatal flaw of this card, of course, is to assume that credits and cards are comparable, in many ways, they are for purposes of card draw or economy calculations (i.e. Wildcat Strike or Predictive Planogram), but where credits can be stacked unlimitedly, cards usually top out at 5 in hand. This makes getting yourself as many cards as the Corp, substantially easier than getting as many credits because the Corp can't generate a hand-size lead in the same way they can create a credit lead. To achieve a hand-size lead in Faction you'd either have to play Superconducting Hub, which is a pretty bad 3/1 agenda on its own, or use something like Spin Doctor to trigger card draw mid-run, which, is hardly the best use for such a powerful card.

It would have made so much more sense for this card to be put in literally any other faction too, put it in Weyland and they can try and synergize it with The Outfit: Family Owned and Operated and Regulatory Capture without needing to pay 3 influence per copy to import it.

Put it in Haas-Bioroid and they can synergize it with Haas-Bioroid: Precision Design to make it much easier to have a higher number of cards in hand, or with Thule Subsea: Safety Below, which can also make it easier though in the opposite direction by decreasing the maximum hand size of the runner rather than increasing your own.

And of course, there's Jinteki, by combining this card with additional forms of damage you can more reliably keep the runner out, if you put this card at the root of a server with other net-damage cards on top of it, then there is an inherent synergy. Piranhas is made harder to cheat through by the net damage on top of it, and the net damage dealing ICE on top of it are made less porous by the fact there's a Piranhas after them.

But NBN has almost no way to fully utilize this card, perhaps you can generate an extra credit from Your Digital Life, but is that really enough? And pricing it at 3 Influence just makes it so much more cumbersome to import this card into any other faction who might try and do something cool with it.

The idea of Code Gates having "conditional" end-the-run effects while Barriers have "hard" end-the-run effects helps differentiate Code Gates from just seeming like a "Barrier+" (like Enigma or Hortum for example) and makes them more fascinating and complex to play around on the part of both players and I'm interested to see more cards designed in this space. But, Piranhas is just a swing and a miss that is not worth its price.

However, the fact that it also gives the Corporation Bad-Publicity is really strange and I'm not even sure Valentão warrants the bad publicity considering how potentially porous these ICE can be in the wrong situation. Illicit ICE is usually meant to be terrifying and incredibly threatening to runner, hence the stigma associated with it, compare Trebuchet which can trash any installed runner card, including expensive programs or pieces of hardware that would otherwise be hard to trash. Even older now rotated cards like Bulwark end the run dramatically, and take out a program while it's at it. Shinobi has a real chance of killing the runner off of a bad face-check, and Fenris does core damage, which used to be a rarity.

I find the current design philosophy regarding bad publicity confounding, HB ICE like Hákarl 1.0 or Jaguarundi can do core damage off of a bad face check and while Bloop or Tyr have more warning or counterplay (needing a pre-rezzed Harmonic or being able to click-through it) they can still do lasting damage to the runner yet are not illicit. Similarly, Saisentan is infamous for its ability to flatline the runner out of nowhere and while a Cloud Eater won't flatline the runner it can do a heap of damage, wreck the runners board state and bury them in tags if it fires yet both seem to fly under the radar while two conditional ETR Code Gates that do a grand total of 1 net damage are apparently intolerable to the public. Something doesn't add up here.

The tag sub-condition is even stranger, usually, you'll have gone to great lengths to land a tag, and want to use it for something valuable like Hypoxia or End of the Line, simply rezzing a moderately powerful piece of ICE is hardly the peak potential a tag has to offer. So letting you remove a tag instead of taking a bad-publicity usually only matters in the odd game against a tag-me runner. But tag-me is rare, and once again, the potential ways to punish a tag-me runner are far more serious than this. Frankly, if you are playing this piece of ICE, you should be ready and willing to take the Bad Publicity.

Beyond these practical mechanics considerations, this wasn't quite what I was expecting for such an iconic cultural icon as Piranhas. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but perhaps something that did more damage the fewer cards you had in hand, like an ICE version of Blood in the Water that's used as a finisher. Something that starts with 7 "do 1 net damage" subroutines and has one fewer subroutines for each card in hand for example. Or maybe some kind of ICE, where you can include 6 copies in the deck and it tutors other copies of itself out onto the board when you do net damage with it, like, the first Piranhas draws blood and then that attracts the rest. Or something that represents attracting other Piranhas by allowing you to rearrange your ICE behind the Piranhas if it does damage, or allowing you to move the Piranhas behind another piece of ICE when that ICE does damage, or allowing you to force the runner to encounter Piranhas when they after they take net damage or so many other cool possibilities.

TLDR: A rather weak card that sees very little play in the current meta because it can be so easily circumvented and provides very little actual taxing power despite its superficially large numbers.

Adding a review as there isn't one at the time of writing.

Isaac Liberdade is a mobile Sysop, sometimes called a "nomadic" Sysop. This means that, unlike most upgrades, Isaac can move himself around, allowing the benefits of a single, unique card to potentially affect multiple servers across multiple turns. He's one of 4 such mobile Sysops released in the Liberation Cycle, one for each Corp, alongside The Holo Man, Vovô Ozetti and Adrian Seis, the collective of them bring a new mechanic to the game, something that is both refreshing and fascinating. Used correctly, protected, and moved around to where they are most needed these cards can provide incredible value.

At the end of your turn, you may move Isaac to a different server and whenever you do move him, he can place an advancement counter on an unadvanced piece of ICE, note: it does not specify that the ICE itself must be "advanceable" so even though you would gain additional value from advancing a piece of ICE which gains benefits from being advanced, you can advance other pieces of ICE, purely to allow Isaac to set himself up and give himself more targets to increase the strength of.

That being said, Isaac synergizes well with advanceable ICE, since placing an advancement counter on an advanceable piece of ICE is more valuable than placing it on a random piece of ICE and if you already have advanced ICE, Isaac can start increasing their strength immediately. Advanceable ICE is an almost uniquely Weyland mechanic (if we ignore Mestnichestvo) that has gone through multiple iterations throughout the game. Back from Lunar, we can see cards like Tyrant or Woodcutter which could be advanced and gained additional subroutines for each advancement counter, or the set of "space ICE" like Asteroid Belt or Wormhole that gets cheaper when advanced, or ICE that gained additional strength when advanced like Fire Wall or Ice Wall as well as the "7 wonders" archetype that gained special bonuses once they have at least 3 advancement counters like Hortum or Pharos. And, it's a mechanic still going strong today with two new pieces of advanceable ICE released in Liberation Tree Line and Logjam.

Pros / When to Use

Isaac is best played not only with lots of advanceable ICE but also with very large, vertical servers. The more pieces of ICE he can increase the strength of at once, the more value he can generate. In such a situation, he can be bounced back and forth between HQ and R&D or between centrals and the scoring remote, both to stack up advancement counters and to adapt in real-time to where you think you could most benefit from increasing the strength of the ICE to tax or dissuade the runner.

Cons

Unfortunately for Isaac, the metagame in the standard format does not favour glacial, the prevalence of Orca/Lobisomem Kit, K2CP Turbine/Takobi Lat and Arruaceiras Crew ICE destruction Anarchs hasn't been kind to glacial and most people seem to prefer playing assets spam R+ or kill based PE or Thule or just rushing the runner out with PD or Asa, plus whatever AgInfusion: New Miracles for a New World is doing. Building lots of big servers just isn't as actually taxing as you might think.

Beyond that he's expensive to rez and cheap to trash which is never a good combination, you have to try and keep him alive for at least a little while to get him to pay for himself, let alone turn a profit, and that can be hard when the whole point of his ability is that you want to put him on the server you think the runner is most likely to run.

Additionally, the identity you probably think you want to include him with Weyland Consortium: Built to Last, because they both like advanceable ICE, is a bit of a red herring, no pun intended because BTL likes to be the one placing the first advancement counter and so does Isaac. If you didn't already know, BTL has a weird piece of wording that essentially means you only get the credits if you advance it with the basic action, it doesn't give you credits if you "place an advancement counter" such as through Isaac, Wall to Wall or Priority Construction. This makes Isaac clunky to use in BTL at the best of times and actively anti-synergistic at the worst, where either Isaac places the first advancement counter and you miss out on the bonus credits or you place the first advancement counter and Isaac is left without anything to advance. Neither of which allows you to get the most value from Isaac or your identity. Perhaps he is better suited for some kind of glacial Nuvem SA: Law of the Land deck but most Nuvems I see are usually just trying to do some kind of kill combo with End of the Line or Punitive Counterstrike.

This is usually the part where I write a thematic review but since Isaac Liberdade seems to be a fictional character who is not based on anyone in real life and since we don't really have much lore to go off of (unlike The Holo Man for example) I'm just kinda going to spitball here. We know he's a bioroid in Brazil, which means he's freed, which means he's not property... which means he's been hired by and is voluntarily working for Weyland, one of the megacorporations who are secretly trying to enslave his kind all over again... which... is honestly really fascinating, but again, without even any flavour text to work with we don't know much more than that. We can see him yelling or barking orders in his art but that doesn't really tell us all that much about his philosophical standpoint, his reasons for working with Weyland or how much he actually knows.

Beyond that I decided to track down the etymology of his name, Isaac comes from Hebrew (like many Western names, think Jonathan, Jacob, Joseph, Joshua, David, Adam, Benjamin, Daniel, Elijah, Gabriel, Micheal, Noah, Samuel and so on and so forth) and literally means "(he) will laugh" or perhaps in context "he who laughs." From the art alone this couldn't be further from the truth, but it's hard to say if this is intentional irony or if the designers just didn't know and don't care about etymology. Liberdade obviously means freedom, compare liberty, liberate, liberation or even Libertador (Mercury: Chrome Libertador) but once again, it's unclear if this is meant to have a deeper meaning or if someone just thought Liberdade sounded cool. Do all freed bioroids have the surname Liberdade, did Isaac choose his name for himself, did someone else give him this name and if so who? These are questions we may never know the answer to, but it's fun to speculate.

TLDR: One of 4 new nomadic Sysops, it has potential in glacial, advanced ICE decks but is somewhat finicky to integrate with the leading advanced ICE ID Weyland Consortium: Built to Last. Among the 4 Sysops, he's arguably on the lower end of the power spectrum, alongside Vovo and Adrian, which, is all to say that the Holo Man looks like the big brother who bullies all of his younger siblings, (seriously that card is powerful, and will probably be considered even more potent once SanSan City Grid rotates with Dawn)